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It would be good if the supermarkets could use the same testing on their very cheap honey!

Yep. A little further down the road though as I moved a couple of years ago.

It takes a couple of months for stroppy bees to die off so if you requeen in mid March (with what?) you'll have stroppy bees for a good part of the season. As you have a good queen to use, why not use her now?

I bought some early ones with the slot entrance rather than the rotating disk. They were modified to 8-frame and are still in use.

I wonder how many nucs they have sold since they introduced them. Does anyone have any info?

Sometimes the native boys are just trouble, whatever you do, so buying new queens in is the only option. From my queen-rearing something like 1 in 20 are 'flighty' and that queen doesn't survive long or if she isn't too bad, I stick her in a mini-nuc to give me brood for queen-rearing hives...

Often it says a blend of EU and non EU honey - so pretty much any old carp. It's difficult to analyse honey to confirm that it has been adulterated and the supermarkets are not bothered. There was so much adulterated honey coming out of China, it can often be routed through another country to...

A virgin queens needs 5 - 6 days out of the queencell before she is mature enough to mate. If she then has a few days of decent weather, then she should mate OK. Most do. If you have North Easterlies for days on end, that's not good weather for mating! [Quickest I've had is 8 days from emergence...

They do sometimes do that and I don't disagree with Dan. Sometimes they come good though. If you have several apideas on the go, having some brood in the body of the apidea keeps the bees there as they will tend to the brood, so the queencell (or queen) won't get cold if in the same space as the...

My bees will have typically 14 - 16 frames of brood in a usual year. Definitely one National box is too small.

I have tried melting honey out of comb. It doesn't work and the comb collapses in most cases and isn't worth the effort. You can put a super under a brood box with an excluder and entrance in between (close the entrance in the floor). Bees don't like food below them and will draw any...

Stacking vertically also means that your wife/partner does not complain about the number of hives springing up in the garden which can save a considerable ear-bashing! :sneaky:

From my experience, chalk brood follows the queen - I've tried it by putting one in a chalkbrood-free hive. And if a chalk-brood frame goes into a good hive, the chalkbrood goes and it does not contaminate the remainder of the good hive. It might not always be the case and I would not reccomend...

August can be a bad foraging month - I tend to feed colonies gently over the month to encourage laying to ensure a good sized colony going into winter. My girls generally have plenty of pollen at this time of year but bring in little nectar after the blackberry finishes. Loads of pollen and...

Easiest to leave them in two brood boxes. Job done. However if you want to clear some old frames and get the bees to move honey from them into a super above, then you could set up the hive as follows:- This can be done in summer or spring with any frames you want to clear. From bottom to...

Chinese stuff won't be approved. Don't use it.

I have gotten Swibine mini nucs through a mild winter. So you can have a go for a bit of fun. Assuming the queen isn't mated, she should mate in good weather in the next couple of weeks - it's not to late in the season. You might then be able to add some more young bees (the ones left after a...

A resurrection of an old thread! Hi Eric, The odd thing with my colony was that the queen continued to lay in the hive for the rest of the season, with no queencells so why she went out for a walk is unknown to me.

It seems to be a NO from this lot! Seems like you've opened a hive and a sh***y colony leaps out at you from the frames! Beware of the little bu***rs who try to go into your boots and into your cuffs!

HMF develops as a product of time and temperature. You can get honey quite warm 50C - but not for too long. A large bucket takes a long time for the honey in the middle to become runny again - so it's not necessarily an exact science.